Adams,1971

"Brautigan Was Here"
Robert M. Adams
The New York Review of Books, 22 Apr. 1971, pp. 24-26.
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The Brautigan phenomenon, California filtered through Brautigan, has been working itself out, in prose and verse, for several years now. How far has it got, and where is it going? Like the hitchhikers who stand beside Route 1 thumbing rides simultaneously in both directions, it is a distinctive phenomenon which is hard to assess. Still, Brautigan has now moved publishers—whether up, down, or sideways—from City Lights Press to Simon and Schuster, and the occasion is obviously ripe for inquiry.

We begin by distinguishing: on the one hand there is Brautigan's poetry, on the other Brautigan's prose. About the poetry, I can't pretend to offer a very assured judgment. There is a great deal of it, and I haven't seen it all. What I have seen is in a minor key: it comes on rather like the more playful poems of e. e. cummings. There are lots of lively small poems on small, occasional topics; considerable charm, a nicely understated wit—it is deft writing, and that, for a poet, is not much of a compliment.

One of the best things about this poetry is that it doesn't try very hard. Its metaphors drop neatly into place without any agony of thought or torment of feeling. The largest statements I have seen the poet undertake verge on sentimentality ("The Galilee Hitch-Hiker") or nostalgia ("1942"); a good deal of what he turns out is what used to be called jeux d'esprit, vers de circonstance, or some other French name implying more sauce than substance.

A nice, medium-sized Brautigan poem, by which the general tenor of his verse can be gauged, is "The Return of the Rivers."
All the rivers run into the sea;
yet the sea is not full;
unto the place from whence the
rivers come,
thither they return again.

It is raining today
in the mountains.

It is a warm green rain
with love
in its pockets
for spring is here,
and does not dream
of death.

Birds happen music
like clocks ticking heavens
in a land
where children love spiders,
and let them sleep
in their hair.

A slow rain sizzles
on the river
full of frying flowers,
and with each drop
of rain
the ocean
begins again.

It is elegantly balanced verse, on a theme that the author himself announces as commonplace, but that he redeems into (at most) charm by a set of carefully graduated metaphors, from the cheap use of "love" early on to the pointedly anti-poetical "pan full of frying flowers" at the end, dropped in to make sure we don't take the dreamy tone too seriously.

The prose pieces (one can't call them novels or even fictions—they may well go down in literary history as Brautigans) now number four, and, to this reader's taste, they are much more impressive than the poetry. But they are not easy to describe. They are always set in California, they are always first-person narratives, the narrator is someone who looks and sounds—well, like Brautigan, one has to suppose. And that means, naïve, open, funny, self-derisive, wry, lyric, strange . . . one could add adjectives like "funky" and "hip" and "weird," but since these all have to be accompanied by the expression "y'know what I mean?" and a gesture they are hardly worth using.

Brautigans involve people just living around in a landscape that is vaguely compounded of shacks, scenery, and catch phrases; they have slightly improbable ways of getting by, but as they don't need much and aren't wildly ambitious, their needs are easily met by the usual raunchy, hand-to-mouth means. They do seem to understand one another pretty well, and thus come to live in a kind of Brautigan subculture into which recognizable America—fearful suspicious, apologetic, hair-trigger violent—obtrudes only occasionally. One mark of their separateness that a reader is first bothered by and then, after a while, becomes rather attached to, is the use of an occasional phrase in what Gogol would call its "hemorrhoidal" sense—all-purpose, asyntactical, repetitious, skewball. The people of In Watermelon Sugar live near a watermelon sugar factory, one of whose byproducts is a flammable something called watermelontrout oil. There's some sort of institution in the town, perhaps a boarding house, called iDEATH, and a gang of baddies led by a character named inBOIL.

Described in these terms, the Brautigan probably sounds like a collection of rather silly and pointless verbal jokes; and it's doubtless possible to get so worked up over these conscious absurdities that one forgets to see anything else. But In Watermelon Sugar (1968) is a good place to jump off on one's Brautigan readings, precisely because it's so apparent that there is a great deal to it. It seems to me a fable, but also a nightmare, of innocence. Our nameless narrator is a sweet, simple, well-meaning person; practically the first thing he tells us is that he has a gentle life. Sometimes he is a writer, sometimes he is a sculptor: there seems to be a great deal of odd sculpture in the quiet rural community of watermelon sugar.

But he is troubled by all sorts of violence, some actual, some recollected. There used to be tigers in watermelon sugar, rather talkative and explanatory tigers, who (it turns out) devoured the narrator's parents one day. Still very present are inBOIL and his gang, who live down by the Forgotten Works, making their own rotten whiskey in the woods, and despising the nice, good people at iDEATH. And worse than all these for our narrator, though less dramatic, is the basic problem of the book, Margaret and Pauline. The problem is simply that it used to be Margaret who slept with the narrator, and now it is Pauline.

Margaret does not take this change at all well, to our narrator's great distress. She takes to hanging around inBOIL and his gang of nasties; then, when, out of bravado, they cut themselves to pieces with jackknives, Margaret goes off and hangs herself from an apple tree. Though the iDEATH people are generally relieved at the solution of the inBOIL problem, they are distressed at the suicide of Margaret. Fred, the narrator's friend, is very sorry; Margaret's brother feels real bad; Pauline regrets it deeply; the narrator sincerely wishes she hadn't done it; but there is not much to be said, now that it is done. They bury her, after the traditional watermelon sugar fashion, in a lighted glass coffin set in the river bed, and the book ends with preparations for the traditional funeral dance, a waltz in the trout hatchery.

Like Agnes Varda's lovely movie Le Bonheur, which it resembles in many ways, this fable of Brautigan's seems to be deeply ambiguous; you can read it forward (with Pauline and the iDEATH people as the civilized element) or backward (with inBOIL and pals as the outcast-pariah heroes) or neutrally, with a shrug of the shoulders for poor Margaret. Our narrator, with his aspirations toward a "gentle life," can't conceivably come off very well, and the simple fact that nobody in the book blames him for Margaret's death may be read as an invitation to the reader to do so. The end of inBOIL and cronies comes about when they understand the principles of the place better than those who live there, and prove the point by slashing themselves (thumbs, noses, ears, eyes) gorily to pieces. So they are evidently more victims than heroes (if that's our choice), and the iDEATH ideal, to which the narrator and Pauline are snugly accommodating themselves at the end of the book, looks more dubious than ever.

Yet to dissect it in this way, into allegory, is also to wrong it; for all its quirkiness and funkiness (y'know what I mean?), In Watermelon Sugar is a beautiful American book, a kind of Our Town in depth, with the ancient American problem (can we conceivably be as sincere and innocent as we pretend without also being filthy liars and hideously cruel?) at the heart of it.

Trout Fishing in America is the earlier (1967) and, in this reader's judgment, the next best Brautigan; but one must note respectfully that it seems to have had a better press than In Watermelon Sugar. Probably this is because it feels like a bigger book. I found it more diffuse and episodic, a little more forced in some of its fun, a little more disposed to rely on obscenity for easy effects. Without any of the structure of In Watermelon Sugar, it is wilder and more fantastic in its use of language, more eloquent and various in its accounts of some very quirky people—a kind of visionary comic-book apocalypse about fresh-water Americans and their nature. If it gets less than top marks with this accountant, that's probably due to a basic preference for more controlled books which I couldn't begin to justify logically. Trout Fishing and In Watermelon Sugar, whichever one happens to prefer, are a pair of vigorous and original books, and the crown of Brautigan's achievement so far.

By contrast, I couldn't get very excited over A Confederate General from Big Sur, the first of the lot (1964). The problem here is simply that, being unsure of itself, it tries too hard. In essence the book amounts to an extended version of those stories that begin, "I met this guy in North Beach last summer, you'll never believe it, was he wacky, just let me tell you." Self-consciousness is the curse of the Brautigan characters: when they start assuring us how quaint they are and performing quaint capers to prove the point, the cause is as plainly lost as it was when Longstreet called on Pickett to charge.

So it's clear, when one looks back over the line of Brautigans from last published to first, that the author has been growing in assurance, in control, in ambition. But the books are still very different from one another, especially in organization; and it wouldn't have been at all easy to predict, from the three previous ones, what the fourth book, just published, would be like. As a matter of fact, there is some reason to feel that, despite publication dates, The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966, may have been planned if not written before Trout Fishing and In Watermelon Sugar. It is a good deal less grotesque and fantastic than its forerunners, a good deal less ambitious as well. It doesn't play as many tricks with the prose or with the surface of things: it is a milder, blander book than either of its immediate predecessors.

The narrator of The Abortion, once again nameless, is a nice earnest simple young man who works in a library. But it is an odd library, since it only takes in books that people have written and never gives them out, yet requires the librarian to be available twenty-four hours a day. Irresistibly, inconceivably, alluring Vida Kramar brings in a book she has written in order to explain how uncomfortable she feels in her much-to-provocative body. Being smashingly attractive is a hard problem for her. Still, just by being nice, the librarian manages to make her feel better about it; and, to make a simple story short, it's her abortion that provides the central episode of the plot. With the help of Foster, a diamond in the rough, they take a plane to San Diego, a bus to Tijuana, and then . . . but there's no point to reciting the whole story in a review.

What makes the situation go is its radical instability. Our hero is presented as such a helpless innocent, Vida is so frantically desirable to all passing males, and the situation is so plainly fraught with the possibilities of hideous misfortune that one is spooked on every page by phantoms of multiple catastrophe. But, like all other Brautigan innocents, this pair seems to enjoy a special immunity. Evil quietly evaporates around them, and none of the hideous destinies to which Candide heroes are traditionally prone actually befalls them. The librarian does indeed get a nasty jolt on his return to San Francisco, but Vida and Foster are confident the change will be good for him, and, like parents with a scared, backward child, they manuever him into a new role that leaves him quite happy.

It is a solution open to the same kind of sardonic ambiguity that marked In Watermelon Sugar. Happy adjustment is fine, just fine; but it's a little creepy too, and maybe life with Vida and Foster as quasi-parents has a certain relation to the Muerte that was built into the Tijuana expedition as its central purpose. At any rate, by the end of the book, our hero has built himself a certain status as practically everyone's favorite puppy-dog; and unless Mr. Brautigan is a much clumsier artist than I think him to be, he wants that fact to trouble the reader at least some.

The surfaces of the new book are a good deal less skewed than those of the previous two; it has none of those fey watermelons, trouts, and verbal knots in the grain of the narrative. What is queer about the world of The Abortion is mostly the librarian's exaggerated, artless simplicity of mind; it makes for a series of small jokes, which can be represented best by isolated quotes.

We drove down Divisadero and saw a man washing the windows of a funeral parlor with a garden hose. He was spraying the hose against the second-floor windows. It was not a normal thing to see, so early in the morning.

[At the airport restaurant] There were Negro men in white uniforms doing the cooking while wearing tall white hats, but there were no Negros in the restaurant eating. I guess Negroes don't take airplanes early in the morning.

[On the bus to Tijuana] San Diego grew very poor and then we were on a freeway. The country down that way is pretty nothing and not worth describing. . . . Vida looked out the window at what is not worth describing, but even more so and done in cold cement freeway language. She didn't say anything.

There is a touch of the cunning and tricksy about these jokes; one feels a deliberate element in their simplicity, so that the narrators seems already to have settled into his destined role as campus character. The worst things that can happen to him aren't very bad, and the best aren't very good. He's evidently a victim of that creeping California disease which amounts to saying, to yourself or to others, "What the hell. I'm pretty much okay the way I am, right?" There are a lot of places in the world where it depends; there is a real chance you may be—oh well, like stupid or maybe infantile, and sometimes it even matters, to the point of doing something about it. Not here. It would be too much to ask of Mr. Brautigan that he commit himself to a point of view on his characters; it really would, that's not just sarcasm.

He leaves us the possibility of irony; nailing it down explicitly would narrow, not widen, his effect. His art lies in making things out of a scene, and the things he chooses to make aren't moral judgements, they're not even compatible with moral judgements. But the things he makes can and must involve large or trifling attitudes, maybe not toward people (I think Brautigan is too modern to care a damn about people), but toward the language and vision that are his special gift.

The Abortion, I feel, doesn't make generous use of the qualities manifested in the previous two novels. It isn't a bad book, it just isn't much of a book. That isn't a very startling judgement, of course; small achievements are what make up publishers' long lists. But Brautigan has done too much in the genuinely imaginative, powerfully controlled way of vision to be accepted readily as an artificer of the country cute.

Anonymous,1973

"Precious Little: Richard Brautigan; The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966"
Anonymous
The Times Literary Supplement [London], 2 Feb. 1973, p. 113.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Besides sporting the usual photographic study of Richard Brautigan, the jacket of his new book features the usual crop of superlatives which met his most recent works: "delightfully zany, tender . . . charming . . . extremely relevant . . . refreshingly new . . . unegotistical [sic] . . . like the fresh air of the ocean . . . zany charm". Mr. Brautigan is a cult-figure of the American young (by whom, one would have thought, to be praised were no small dispraise), along with, for example, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Mr. Vonnegut earned this following by being artfully artless, by making the difficult look easy. Mr. Brautigan, on the other hand, got it by being artlessly artless, by not bothering to conceal the fact that the easy is easy. The added ingredient of pretentiousness seems to have obscured this difference to American youth and British critics alike.

The plot of The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 lends itself to brief summary. A whacky young man runs an offbeat library, where people go to submit books rather than to take them out ("This is not that kind of library. This is another kind of library" pouts the narrator). The young man zanily welcomes and catalogues all the talentless rubbish that his kooky subscribers bring along. One day a beautiful screw-ball named Vida submits a crackpot autobiographical work about how much she dislikes her body, and elaborate structure that she considers vulgarly Playboy; the daffy "librarian" reassures her; whimsical intercourse takes place. After a few nutty weeks Vida gets pregnant and so the cuckoo "librarian" contacts Foster, the fat old hippie who stores the overflow of "library" books in a distant cave. Foster fixes up the abortion; the oddball couple go to Mexico to have it; they return to find the "library" has been taken over, so they move to Berkeley, where Vida works in a topless bar and the ex-"librarian" becomes a goofy youth cult-figure. As is usual with Mr. Brautigan, motives are explored hardly at all and mood only by a doped, moonish obliquity in the recording of external events and settings. The responsibility is therefore firmly placed on the quality of the prose, and it is here that Mr. Brautigan flops on his face. The Abortion reads as if it were written—or murmured into a tape recorder—over a long weekend.

For the most part the style is irreducibly banal, a simpering, goo-goo baby-talk drizzle of the kind of thoughts that come into the mind crying out to be imperiously dismissed: "The menu said good morning to me and I said good morning back to the menu. We could actually end our lives talking to menus"; "I do not know what she was looking at, but she was looking at something very intently. I believe the thing she was looking at was inside herself. It had a shape that only she could see." His famous "surreal" effects have a similar preciosity: "It is not a large bell, but it travels intimately along a small silver path that knows the map to our hearing"; "Her eyes had small friendly lightning walking across them"; "San Francisco International Airport waited, looking almost medieval in the early morning like a castle of speed on the entrails of space." As for zany humour? "He looked as if he had been beaten to death with a wine bottle, but by doing it with the contents of the bottle." Ten minutes' worth here might have produced a decent sentence; as it is, Mr. Brautigan squares up to hit the nail on the head and finishes with a bloodily pulped thumb.

What these extracts have in common, apart from flatness and coquetry, is a studied evasion of saying anything: Mr. Brautigan's prose is not about people or objects or behaviour but about Mr. Brautigan—his charm, tenderness, innocence, and self-infatuation. He is both champion and victim of the current reaction against artifice, which doesn't ask a novel to be "life-like"—this would in any case be simplistic, reductive, presumptuous—but neither does it ask a novel to be anything else: like, for example, a work of art, the result of deliberation and hard work. There is possibly a minor talent flitting round somewhere in Mr. Brautigan's books. He will continue to write and be read; but it is too late for him ever to begin to try.

Blakeston,1973

"Richard Brautigan"
Oswell Blakeston
Books & Bookmen Mar. 1973: 76.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Every town should have one—a library where anyone who has written a book can take the manuscript and be received with ceremony and have his title entered in a register before the book is placed on shelves which are otherwise never touched. Rimbaud talked of "soul for one's soul's sake" and that's the art these unpublishable authors have been practising, and they deserve the comfort of a little courtesy when they've completed a labour which one might say was indefensible until one looks at the alternatives. Yes, while X was writing his book he was not making your life a misery by practising the piano, or working mayhem in the marts of trade, or driving us all to despair by cooking up new legislation in Westminster.

Anyway the young curator of such a library in Brautigan's novel takes his job seriously. In a day he may receive a cookbook of recipies found in Dostoevsky's novels written by a man who has eaten everything Dostoevsky ever cooked; and Pancake Pretty written by a child with a face struck by a tornado of freckles, a book about a pancake; and literary essays by a woman who's always admired Edmund Wilson and is about 50 and looks like Edmund Wilson: and all the authors are made to feel that they have a tiny claim to immortality with a title in the register.

Nice. But then the librarian is seduced by a beautiful girlie who feels that her soul, which simply wants to write unpublishabe books, does not belong to her beautiful body. The librarian sympathises, and pretty soon the couple go off to Mexico to find a recommended doctor for an abortion. The rest is touching and sweetly done in stereotype; but what happend suddenly to Mr. B's originality? Yet however much one grieves for the collapse of invention, I think the book is still worth your attention for the lovely whacky wayout library operation.

Butwin,1971

"The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966"
Joseph Butwin
Saturday Review, 12 June 1971, pp. 52, 67.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Richard Brautigan's novels have taken their place among the standard extra-curricular reading of college students. Their special appeal to the young may lie in Brautigan's capacity to make a myth that satisfies the demands of recent American experience, for he writes refreshing comedy that happens to accommodate a growing sense of disaster. A young man in his latest novel says, "I think we have the power to transform our lives into brand-new instantaneous rituals that we calmly act out when something hard comes up that we must do. We become like theaters." Hard times are with us, and Richard Brautigan provides his readers with the ritualistic and theatrical equipment appropriate for survival.

In The Abortion the question of survival is raised by a girl cursed with beauty. Vida (pronounced V-eye-da to throw you off the allegorical track) harbors a troubled conscience in a spectacular body that American admen "would have made into a national park if they would have gotten their hands on her." Personifying one of our national values, the seductive Vida so distracts admirers that they crash automobiles and commit suicide; English teachers "fall like guillotines" and old men drop ice-cream cones in the sand when they see her coming. Vida brings her body and the story she has written to show "how horrible physical beauty is, the full terror of it," to a library dedicated to collecting "the unwanted, the lyrical and haunted volumes of American writlng."

She falls in love with the innocent, fastiduous, reclusive librarian who narrates the story. Love draws each out of his shell (in her case the magnificent body; in his, the strange library) but her pregnancy by him leads them through that sink of American dreams, Tijuana, for an abortion. After it they return to America—as the United States is called—and "A New Life," with Vida no longer ashamed of her beauty, and the librarian, who has begun to "discover the twentieth century all over again," gathering funds for the sponsor of his library, The American Forever, Etc. Working with "people that need" him, he becomes at last "a hero in Berkeley."

The trials of Vida form an implicit critique of our culture: The physical beauty, bombs, industrial proliferation, and commercial techniques we cherish have gotten us into trouble. And the price we are paying for them reverberates through our movie theaters and paperback bookshops—the temples of youth. A pile of money, an American flag, and a beautiful machine leave Peter Fonda's Easy Rider burning in a ditch, and his prophetic words, "we blew it," reach beyond the roadside into all aspects of our national experience. In The Abortion Brautigan tells that sad story in a new way. His Captain America is a woman, and the possibility of love and a fresh start survives the premature termination of life in America.

If Brautigan himself is a hero among students it is precisely because his writing is not academic, in the sense that an "academic" question produces no repercussions in the world. He creates a myth and convinces readers that he actually lives it. A new life can be reconstructed, he seems to say, out of the rubble of American failure, along the model of a renaissance that strangely follows abortion. Take a few steps back to the point where things began to go wrong and then start over again. Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America culminates in a place called the Cleveland Wrecking Yard, where a man can put together a new life (as well as a fresh trout stream) out of old junk. The hero of In Watermelon Sugar, an allegorical tale, is writing a chronicle of what appears to be a post-Bomb community rebuilding itself with that most basic commodity, watermelon sugar.

In The Abortion Brautigan himself appears as an author contributing his book to the American Forever library. The librarian-narrator says that he was "tall and blond and had a long yellow mustache that gave him an anachronistic appearance. He looked as if he would be more at home in another era." That is, of course, the man we know from the covers of his books: lanky and old-fashioned in his reclaimed clothes, with the hair and mustache of a gunslinger—a Wild Bill Hickok or a General Custer who managed to survive. The costume represents a retrospective but basically optimistic movement to recover the human and natural resources that have been trampled in America.

That a cult should grow around Brautigan is no accident; he plans it that way. And it isn't just his appearance that makes people associate the man with the myth he describes. Everything he writes reinforces the modern sense that a literary style might also be a life-style. His writing is as brief and immediate as a telegram or a message left on a door for a friend. The dedication of The Abortion—"Frank: come on in—read novel—it's on table in front room. I'll be back in about 2 hours. Richard."—sets the simple style of writing and of living, and Brautigan offers himself as an exemplar of simplicity in a complex age. Literature transforms itself immediately into cult.

A cult of this kind meets resistance. Can the simple persona survive in the aura of theatricality that surrounds Brautigan and his friends and disciples? Is it possible to make a myth about oneself and still remain sufficiently humble and human not to offend the audience? It may be that myths cannot be manufactured but must evolve slowly and accidentally to answer the unspoken demands of a society. Brautigan himself begins to confront these contradictions in his understanding that "we become like theaters" even as we perform our "brand-new instantaneous rituals." He recognizes that a mythology adequate to the task of reconstruction will need models, and The Abortion is an attempt to supply one.

Clark,1984

"Abortion and the Missing Moral Center: Two Case Histories from the Post-Modern Novel"
William Bedford Clark
Xavier Review, vol. 4, no. 1-2, 1984, pp. 70-75.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

[Introductory material deleted . . .]

Since the Supreme Court's 1973 decision in the case of Roe vs. Wade, virtually all legal restraints on abortion have been lifted by judicial fiat. In a secular society, what is legal is assumed to be moral. The attitudes behind the Court's decision, and those in turn nutured by it, are now finding fictional expression, and I believe that a look at two pertinent texts, Richard Brautigan's The Abortion (Simon and Schuster, 1971) and Philip Roth's The Professsor of Desire, (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1977) is useful if we are to grasp the literary consequences of this radical shift in values.

Brautigan's novel, which bears the suggestive but cryptic subtitle An Historical Romance, is a kind of tearful-comedy along absurdist lines, precisely the kind of book that has made its author a cult-figure among many readers who came of age in the late '60s and early '70s. A curious blend of fantasy and disturbing realism, it recounts the adventures of a nameless, and all-but-faceless, narrator who works as the curator for a bizarre library, a Kafkaesque repository for unpublished and unread books. One night, a beautiful girl enters his life (and his bed), and soon afterward she becomes pregnant. An abortion is a foregone conclusion, and the couple sets off for Tijuana, where (this is prior to the Supreme Court's ruling) the operation is an important cottage industry of sorts, indeed one might almost say a tourist attraction. Their mission accomplished, they return to the States, but the protagonist-narrator loses his job at the library and they move to Berkeley, where he becomes, for reasons that remain altogether inexplicable, something of a "hero" to members of the counter-culture in and around the University.

Though the issue of abortion in Brautigan's novel involves no real soul-searching, nor apparent regrets, on the part of his characters, it would be a mistake, I think, to suggest that the author is treating the matter in a cavalier fashion. The scenes within the abortion clinic are the most densely realistic in the book, leading some readers to feel that Brautigan is writing from first-hand observation. The Mexican abortionist, not above engaging in a little price-gouging when he thinks he can get away with it, is basically a conscientious and hard-working man who applies himself to his trade to the point of exhaustion and must take a brief respite to refuel himself with a hastily-cooked steak and a bottle of beer. Periodically a young boy empties the product of the doctor's labors into the commode, as if it were so much fecal rather than fetal material. These images speak a language of their own and imply things that go beyond the dispassionate monotony of the narrative voice, and the flushing of the fetuses and almost ritualistic sterilization of the abortionist's instruments with flame suggests, even to the rather somnambulant mind of the protagonist, overtones of human sacrifice, of pre-Columbian rites of water, fire, and blood. Furthermore, as Terrence Malley shows, the entire episode is framed by images of generation and rebirth. The neighborhood in which the clinic is located is alive with children, who cast telling looks in the direction of the abortionistas, and the season is Easter. Even as the couple phones the clinic from the Woolworth's in downtown Tijuana, they are surrounded by tawdry Easter eggs, debased but unmistakable promises of new life.

It is true that in keeping with the logic of Brautigan's book—logic is not quite the right word but I use it for want of a better—the trip to the abortionist paradoxically precipitates a rebirth of the protagonist into the real world, leading as it does to his expulsion from the womblike insulation afforded him by his live-in position at the library, but there may well be irony here too, for he remains passive and infantile even in his vague role as "hero" in Berkeley. A nagging question remains in the reader's mind: Has this "hero" merely traded one kind of death-in-life for another? While Brautigan presents his characters in a sympathetic enough light—they merge as two likeable albeit shallow children—his own attitude toward their actions remains tentative and ambiguous. This ambiguity, a vital one in my estimation, stems from the fact that the novel lacks a definable moral center. The author is unwilling to condemn abortion outright, but neither is he wiling to avoid its reality—life is destroyed in the process. Brautigan does not dodge this issue, as do those today who take refuge in the euphemism of technical jargon and refer to abortion as "the termination of a pregnancy" or to the fetus as "the contents of the uterus." Instead, he wrestles, however inconclusively, wtih the painful dilemmas rising from a clash of old and new moralities. He is wiser than his characters, perhaps wiser than he knows, and as a result his novel has a measure of moral complexity that repays the efforts of the reader, Christian or otherwise, who is willing to approach it seriously.

[Material regarding Phillip Roth's The Professor of Desire deleted here . . .]

Looking back over what I have said here, I realize that my remarks constitute more of an implicit jeremiad than a strict exercise in literary criticism. So be it, for I believe that the shift in the way certain contemporary writers treat abortion (or rather evade its full reality) is an important indication of how increasingly our literature is becoming less a response to the modern wasteland than a mere reflection of it. But I would be remiss if I neglected to note that there have been postmodern American writers who have indeed wrestled with the life-and-death implications of this issue with no trace of evasion. Anne Sexton's persona in her poem "The Abortion," for example, ultimately rejects a mendacious euphemism for the act with an honesty that even today jolts the complacency of readers who otherwise seem quite comfortable with Roe vs. Wade (See Lois Spatz's article in College English, no. 44, pp. 674-684), and in his late poem "Fetus," Sexton's one-time mentor Robert Lowell likewise names things for what they are and reminds us that in denying the unborn their full measure of humanity we somehow diminish our own. It may be that the only adequate way in which to handle the pervasiveness of abortion in our society—a very conservative estimate puts the number of such "procedures" at 4,800 per day—is to evoke the nightmare images of surrealism. At least Harlan Ellison's short story "Croatoan" seems to suggest so, in a manner that combines the moral allegory of Hawthorne with the incisive fantasy of Kafka. These three writers suggest that the beginning of life does in fact partake of the miraculous and that we as human beings, are thus, a priori, very much worth caring about, an assumption upon which the health of literature may well depend.

Hackenberry,1982

"Romance and Parody in Brautigan's 'The Abortion'"
Charles Hackenberry
Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, vol. 23, no. 2, Winter 1982, pp. 24-36.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Richard Brautigan's longer works of fiction present various difficulties to reviewers and critics, and one of the most troublesome concerns their genre. Witness the problem of one critic: "Trout Fishing in America is not an anti-novel; it is an un-novel." Even less informative is another's comment, which calls Brautigan's books "prose pieces (one can't call them novels or even fictions—they may well go down in literary history as Brautigans)." One might also speak, presumably, about Hemingways and Donnes as well. That each writer makes a form his own is well understood. What seems less clear is his debt to the tradition or traditions he chooses.

The difficulty of analyzing Brautigan's works of fiction and comparing them to similar works is complicated by his habit of projecting the outlines of various established forms upon his own: The Hawkline Monster (1974) is subtitled A Gothic Western; Willard and His Bowling Trophies (1975) is also A Perverse Mystery; Sombrero Fallout (1976) calls itself A Japanese Novel. His recent book-length fiction, Dreaming of Babylon: A Private Eye Novel 1942 (1977), continues the practice. By examining the first of Brautigan's excursions into sub-titling, The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 (1971), I intend to explore here the degree to which the work is an actual romance and the degree to which it is not, obtaining from such an analysis an interpretation of the work that considers its form to be an essential part of its meaning.

In one sense, asserting that a book that has An Historical Romance 1966 on its cover is indeed a generic romance seems a bit too easy, yet it needs saying. Romance is widely used, especially when dealing with popular fiction, to designate any kind of love story. That The Abortion is a love story, in addition to whatever else it is, only muddles the matter—as does a curious sentence on the cover of the paperback edition: "This novel is about the romantic possibilities of a public library in California." The effect of this ambiguity and funning is to hide the fact that many features of The Abortion show characteristics of the romance.

The theories of the Northrop Frye, especially those which deal with myth and archetype, seem especially relevant to an explication of the romance qualities of this work. Frye's interest, in contrast to that of much recent criticism, is often generic in nature, and the problem of genre is, to a large degree, the main problem raised by The Abortion; his is a broad critical system that is relatively well known and widely understood. Furthermore, his work in both Anatomy of Criticism (1957) and The Secular Scripture (1976) is detailed, current, and specific. For example, Frye notices that one of the essential differences between the romance and the novel is a matter of characterization: "The romance does not attempt to create "real people" so much as stylized figures which expand into psychological archetypes. It is in the romance that we find Jung's libido, anima, and shadow reflected in the hero, heroine, and villain respectively. This is why the romance so often radiates a glow of subjective intensity that the novel lacks, and why a suggestion of allegory is constantly creeping in around its fringes."

The unnamed narrator of The Abortion, though distinguished by eccentric attitudes and gentleness, is never fully realized. While he is admirable for his view of humanity, a self-imposed isolation and his chosen role tend to reduce him in stature. This double nature is important for the construction of the story and will be discussed later. Estranged and remote, he lives a life apart, both in the depths of the library and in the labyrinthine rooms of the Mexican abortion doctor who performs the requested surgery on the relentlessly beautiful heroine, Vida. The stereotype of the mayhem-producing beautiful female has been traced from Katrina Van Tassel in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," Cecily Burns in George Washington Harris' Sut Lovingood tales, Eula Varner in The Hamlet, and Griselda of God's Little Acre to the public image of Marilyn Monroe. Vida, as a character name, has also been derived from the Latin vita, meaning life. If such interpretation is correct, the symbolic characterization thus produced tends not toward individualization but toward stylization and allegory. A similar feature of characterization has been observed in an earlier work: "Brautigan has no interest in character, in introspection or psychological insight, in inter-personal dynamics." While such observations are as applicable to The Abortion as they are to Trout Fishing in America (1967), the comment on psychological insight must be defined as that sort of self-analysis and self-discovery that is usually associated with the novel. Brautigan is, indeed, working toward psychological insights, but of a nature quite unusual in modern book-length fiction—that is to say, in contemporary novels.

Identifying a shadow figure is more difficult. At first glance, the Mexican abortion doctor may seem to serve, but although he is the agent of a certain degree of death at a set fee, he is not ultimately suited, for he is in no sense an adversary of either hero or heroine. The Abortion lacks an individual villain, but evil does exist in the narrative. The harshness of life outside the library is the shaping force on those who bring their pitiful volumes to be catalogued, and the strictures of law and society, as they prohibit abortion in American, necessitate the quest. What has clearly happened here is displacement, "the adjusting of formulaic structures to a roughly credible context." Some degree of displacement is also seen in the character of the librarian who seems libidinous only in relation to Vida, demonstrated chiefly by his reaction to her body and in contrast with his former existence: "I had never in my life seen a woman graced with such a perfect body whose spell was now working on me. As certain as the tides in the sea rush to the shore, I showed her my room."

The very real subjective intensity of The Abortion is best explained by the explication of Centroversion, a theory which finds "the gradual identification of the ego with the conscious rather than the unconscious" to be the underlying psychological pattern of the romance. Four stages in the evolution of the ego can be identified: stage one is a passive perfection which begins before birth and continues into infancy; it is a period of harmony, security, and stasis. Pain and want do not exist, and all the needs of the ego are catered to. The gentle librarian of The Abortion has his needs met by some unseen force in the beginning of the story; Foster brings him food, and his pay arrives, mysteriously though irregularly, from the America Forever, Etc. The narrator has drifted on in passive bliss for the past three years. His only responsibilities are to collect the manuscripts of America's losers, catalogue them, and be nice—all of which may be accomplished without leaving his womb-like place of employment. The work's first two sentences suggest a parallel between the library and the subconscious: "This is a beautiful library, timed perfectly, lush and American. The hour is midnight and the library is deep and carried like a dreaming child into the darkness of these pages" (11).

Stage two of Centroversion consists of the "ego's struggle to free itself from domination by the unconscious" and is a period of the learning and testing. The ego now is able to discriminate between the conscious and the subconscious. Brief tentative flights into the broad world would seem to precede total separation, and the narrator has two such experiences outside the library. The first is very brief, because he forgets to take money to make a phone call. The second is more successful; he functions well enough to call Foster, a fellow employee of American Forever, Etc., who arranges the abortion and generally fills the traditional role of the hero's assistant. For The Abortion, the second period of Centroversion also includes the van ride, the flight to San Diego, and the bus trip to Tijuana—the start of the quest. The narrator begins to break free from his comfortable, confined world at the expense of the safety and security that the library offered.

The new balance that marks stage three of Centroversion seems to occur during the period of the three abortions. A final break with the subconscious is not immediately recognizable as such, but a subtle change takes place in the narrator's character. He notices women other than Vida sexually for the first time. Apparently, the separation of the ego from the subconscious is final, for on attempting to return to the comfortable numbness of his former occupation, he finds himself permanently expelled. Although the experience disturbs him deeply, his expulsion into the world is welcomed by both Vida and Foster, characters whose egos have already completed the voyage. They celebrate the protagonist's complete separation from the unconsciousness that the library represents.

In the last chapter, entitled "A New Life" the narrator becomes an activist. He collects money for American Forever, Etc., and takes joy in his contact with others—as he did in the library, certainly, but now that his ego is loose from its former confines, he is positive rather than conciliatory. Though his efforts are for the same cause, and this seems to be important, he has now entered society. His life with Vida, Foster, and Foster's Pakistani girlfriend is much richer than his former existence. The process has produced a hero—at least in Berkeley of the sixties. The movement from isolation to society is, incidentally, opposite to that noticed in Trout Fishing in America and other social novels of the 1960's in America.

Much of the subjective intensity of The Abortion comes from the reader's recognition, probably at some deeply subliminal level, that the drama enacted in the romance has its counterpart in the history of the individual perceiving ego. Like members of the original audience at a classical Greek tragedy, we are not really very interested in the major turns of the plot, for we already know what must happen. Rather, we attend with a keen eye to see how the details will fall into place, to apprehend how the uncompromising universal law will influence this particular situation, these unusual people. Brautigan is interested in psychological insights at this level, and such struggle generates the unquestionable tension of the work. That "the situation is so fraught with the possibilities of hideous misfortune that one is spooked on every page by phantoms of multiple catastrophe" is a measure of the intensity, though somewhat overstated.

Other characteristics of The Abortion also mark it as romance. Northrop Frye has suggested in the passage already quoted that the genre has an allegorical dimension. On one level, this story can easily so be read: "the library is a metaphor for America itself, and... its sequence of timid, strange, insecure librarians are the comic equivalents of American presidents." Even if such interpretation is valid, the allegory is still only partial; though the narrator is the thirty-fifth or thirty-sixth librarian, which corresponds to the numbering of presidents at the time the work was written (Cleveland's terms accounting for the confusion), the allegory is primarily peripheral. It is not a point-for-point allegory. While the library / America symbolism applies neatly for some levels of the story, the shaping force outside the library, which produces emotional cripples, must still be reckoned with—and it, too, is America.

Characterization and subjective intensity are but two of Frye's criteria for romance. One of this most important qualifications concerns plot, and here as well The Abortion stands close analysis: "The completed form of the romance is clearly the successful quest, and such a completed form has three main stages: the stage of the perilous journey and the preliminary minor adventures; the crucial struggle... and the exaltation of the hero." The preliminary adventures of The Abortion begin with the narrator's contact with those who bring manuscripts to him. They are a varied lot: the old and the young, the confused and the bizarre. Among the group is a character named Richard Brautigan who brings a story entitled Moose which he describes as " Just another book" (27). For the most part, this seems to be another of Brautigan's jokes on himself, but we are never quite sure how to take him. Does he mean to identify himself with broken and confused "writers" that America has produced? Does he mean to separate himself from the persona of the narrator? A similar situation occurs in Hawthorne's Blithdale Romance where Priscilla is compared to Margaret Fuller... the author apparently wanted to deny the connection which he knew his readers would make between the two." Hawthorne seems to have been fond of the device, for he used another variation of it in the ending of A Wonder Book, where Primrose remarks: "Have we not an author for our next neighbor? That silent man, who lives in the old red house near Tanglewood Avenue, and whom we sometimes meet, with two children at his side, in the woods or at the lake. I think I have heard of his having written a poem, or a romance, or an arithmatic, or a school-history, or some other kind of book."

The speech by Eustace which follows makes the outline of the author standing behind the draperies even more distinct. Given Brautigan's specific parody in Dreaming of Babylon, the coincidence may be no coincidence at all. In The Abortion such self-references form a low-level platform of irony. We see the writer concerned with and almost in the practice of writing—as in Tristram Shandy and In Watermelon Sugar (1968). When Vida asks the narrator what he will do after he quits the library, he answers: "Maybe I'll find another job or find a woman to support me again or maybe I'll write a novel and sell it to the movies" (53). The reader is invited to amuse himself with speculations on the kind of fiction this character would produce; the step which follows is the impossibility of The Abortion as a film. The preliminary adventures are enlivened by arresting sketches of minor characters and intellectual games played on an ironic field.

The principal feature of these preliminary minor adventures, however, is the introduction of Vida into the narrative. Although she is present at the beginning of the tale, her history is gathered together in the first chapter of Book Two as a flashback which details the first meeting of the narrator and the nineteen-year-old heroine whose exquisite face does not match her voluptuous body, a further irony on the romance form, for the heroine's chief problem is her extraordinary beauty. Their first sexual experience provides the core of the initial adventures. While the perilous journey is certainly the trek to Tijuana, the peril, other than that associated with the abortion itself, is unusual, for it consists of nothing more than life in the outside world. The narrator's fear of this world and his unfamiliarity with it reinforce the Centroversion theme, for the struggle consists of the hero's coming to terms with the harshness of external reality. For his pains, the "Library Kid," as Foster calls him, is rewarded with a life that is richer than that of the narrow and confining subconscious. That he becomes a hero is, I believe, an authorial comment on the rarity of the completed transformation.

What Brautigan appears to have done in The Abortion is to construct a story in a traditional form, the romance, using its conventions, its abbreviated characterization, and its plot structure rooted in the emergence of the ego—while exaggerating and distorting romantic elements. One example of such playful manipulation is Brautigan's use of monster imagery. He takes a feature of older romances, their dragons and beasts, and uses the imagery in figurative language: "The jet was squat and leering and shark-like" (117). Often the imagery is visceral and anachronistic in order to evoke the tone of the older forms that it simultaneously follows and makes fun of: "A medieval flap was hanging down from the wings as we took off. It was the metal intestine of some kind of bird, retractable and visionary" (119). A parade of animal images troops through the quest portion of the narrative almost to the degree that may be found in Swift's "The Battle of the Books." Horses, buffaloes, dinosaurs, and unnamed prehistoric animals flock together in ironic configurations. So, too, is heroism scattered randomly through The Abortion; not only are the arches through which one passes on the way to Mexico heroic to the narrator (135), but the sight of Vida and Foster together before the journey brings forth the same term (105). While The Abortion appears to be a genuine romance when viewed from the perspective of Frye's observations on the form as a genre and a vehicle for mythic content, the book is, at the same time, a minor-key parody of romance.

Frye's definition of parody as "the mocking of the exuberant play of art by suggesting its imitation in terms of 'real life'" has import for The Abortion, for while Brautigan relies on the conventions of the romance to provide the structure of his tale and possibly the vehicle for one level of the work's meaning, he suggests that life rarely, if ever, parallels art, especially the art of romance. Unlike a reader's expectations for a story-book hero, the narrator accepts the abortive quest as an alternative to parenthood. The "gentle necessity" of the abortion even seems to be suggested by the "lady in distress," the heroine. Life, Brautigan implies, works out quite differently from fiction: "Alas, the innocence of love was merely an escalating physical condition and not a thing shaped like our kisses" (149). Life's struggles are more concerned with the frequently unpleasant requirements of existence than with notions of heroism that often get tangled around what needs to be done and who we think we are. Villainy exists to the degree that it forces compromises between the heroic, a product of fiction and the imagination, and the real—which cannot be escaped.

One of the strongest elements which turns the tale toward parody is the object of the quest, the abortion. In terms of story values, it is entirely opposite to our expectations of the romance form. Brautigan's handling of the action, however, displays his balancing of romantic and parodic elements. The acceptance of abortion as a solution to the unwanted pregnancy is prepared for by a scene in Book One, where a character identified only as Doctor O. brings his work entitled The Need for Legalized Abortion to the library (30); the attitude of the author of this work is easy to accept because, as nearly as the reader can determine, his motives are right. A second balancing that makes the abortion less of a ludicrous quest-object is the rational discussion of the matter that the librarian and Vida conduct before the reader (67). Their arguments concerning the right time of life to have children seem valid, especially since both are sympathetic characters. Neither has done anything previously that evokes moral censure, and the language of their decision has few reminders that what they intend is, in the eyes of some, the taking of human life. Brautigan's skill in handling imagery, following formulaic structure without seeming to, and creating ambiguity while defusing potential reader unrest allow him to interweave romance and parody, to fabricate a not-quite-polished texture that is nevertheless true to his narrator's voice and personality—and not unpleasant to read despite its often disjointed quality, its superficial incongruity.

Quite another method of examining the relationships between parodic and romantic elements in The Abortion is possible. Not recognizing a separate mode for parody, Frye includes parody as a part of the ironic convention. Works of parody, by their intention, are necessarily ironic, but not all ironic works are parodies. The ironic mode may be seen here because the narrator qualifies on one level as an ironic personality; modes are based on the stature of the hero. The action of The Abortion falls into a plot category for romance: "The successful hero returns as a master of two worlds: that of the beginning of the story and the larger world within which he has completed his quest."

In terms of Centroversion, the narrator completes the evolution of the ego. Even though he may not return to the library, he is a master of that inner world, as evidence by his continuing work for America Forever, Etc. and, more importantly, by his freedom. His activism and, to a degree, his heroism at Berkeley are the successes that the free ego may achieve. He cannot return, but he is not denied achievement in the institution which he still finds valuable—only the form of his contribution alters to fit what he has become. In effect, the hero, from his less than average stature in the beginning, rises to a new height. Toward the end of the story, the narrator's description of his activities, which shows his love for the students and his sense of being needed, reminds us of the comic side of his character in the library, but now his attachment is to the outside world. He is much the same, yet something important about him has changed, for he is finally at home in the outside world—and at peace.

While the action of The Abortion fits very neatly into one plot category for romance, it fits just as well into an ironic slot: irony "essentially treats the individual isolated in a hostile or indifferent world. Ironic mode personalities... may be so fragmented that the reader has little sense of coherent character." The narrator's fragmentation has reached the stage, by the beginning of the tale, that he has difficulty in dealing with the world outside the library. Such alienation has begun before the opening of the story and continues through the rising action; it abates only after the quest is completed and his life inside the library is finished, after his ego is freed from the subconscious. Seen this way, the balance of ironic and romantic elements is a shifting equilibrium—more ironic toward the beginning and more romantic at the end. Though, ironically, the narrator still works for America Forever, Etc., the conclusion has none of the bitterness of many ironic endings. Life is worth living; freedom and fulfillment are possible, though certainly neither easy nor complete.

That both of these categories may be met by the same work without damage to its texture does not indicate a weakness in definition. Instead, the anomaly is a further demonstration that Brautigan has made a successful blend of the two modes. Some argument could be made that an ironic parody should fit the form which it makes light of—and indeed it should, but Brautigan's ending is too positive, too optimistic for an interpretation that The Abortion is only a parody of the romance form. Frye, for all his classification and separation of types into their appropriate cases, clearly recognizes the blending possibilities: "Once we have learned to distinguish the modes, however, we must learn to recombine them. For while one mode constitutes the underlying tonality of a work of fiction, any or all of the other four may be simultaneously present. Much of our sense of the subtlety of great literature comes from his modal counterpoint." While Frye's statement deals with modes and not genres, the observation is still of value, for if the constituents of any theory may be recombined, genres will probably allow the same treatment. Even without taking this step, one may examine the protagonist in light of Frye's statement on mixed modes. The librarian is "superior in degree to other men and to his environment," a characteristic of the typical hero of romance, if compassion or capacity for gentleness are accepted as the criteria for superiority. He, more than anyone else in the narrative, is sympathetic toward the battered souls of the larger world, and his gentleness, a quality of all Brautigan's heroes, wins the heroine. His ability to put people at ease is a motif that runs through the entire work. Certainly, such qualities are not what is usually meant by superiority, but why these qualities, rather than violence or a stern moral code, are unsuitable for a contemporary hero—if indeed they are—is unclear.

The librarian, of course, is not without limitations. Only with the utmost effort is he able to function in society at large. Too, he is somewhat the bungler; his ineptitude at the Green Hotel is one example among many. The quest itself is not of heroic proportions even though it results in a limited degree of heroism for the librarian, whose abilities and convictions—other than those associated with compassion and gentleness—are not above those of ordinary men, and whose accomplishment is at best minimal in the greater world's view. From this perspective, his is an ironic heroism.

Finally, one must ask what is the value of sorting stories into appropriate bins and recognizing elements of various modes: "The reason is that a great romancer should be examined in terms of the conventions he chose... If Scott has any claims to be a romancer, it is not good criticism to deal only with his defects as a novelist." Hawthorne's "Preface" to The House of the Seven Gables sounds much the same note: "When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume, had he professed to be writing a novel." The comments of Frye and Hawthorne have evaluation of the author as their primary concern; certainly, the kind of analysis performed here could be put to such purpose. Brautigan has yet to receive the kind of critical attention he deserves. He is either praised to extremes by those who suppose they hear their own voice in his narrators or characters, or else he is dismissed as an opportunist who panders to popular taste for the money. Brautigan needs a re-evaluation, for his fiction has more complexity than has yet been seen, and rarely is he viewed in terms of the genres and modes that he selects and so often mingles. The subtitle for The Abortion asserts that the work is an historical romance. Normally, we would expect to find figures of history side by side with fictional characters, but we do not—unless the librarian / president symbolism is strained to an uncomfortable point. Furthermore, 1966 is too close to the date of composition of the work for the sort of candle-lit distancing that historical fiction usually trades on. Historical fiction, however, gets a lot of mileage from the differences between the setting of the story and the present; such, surely, is the nature of the point that Brautigan would make.

As a romance The Abortion may be interpreted as Richard Brautigan's record of how American idealism, in the course of a particular year, began to move outward into the light of day and away from its more self-conscious concerns. On one level, Brautigan's romance is his portrait of the peace movement's heroism and efficacy, its solution to the unwanted pregnancy of American intervention in Asia. Such interpretation rests heavily on the romance's capacity for allegory, but it is not an unlikely interpretation when viewed from from the perspective of the parodic elements of the work. To the degree that The Abortion is parody, it becomes a statement of self-doubt, a realization that the power of a minority, no matter how gentle and well-intentioned, is dependent on its activism. The ability to change the course of American thought is the point of difference between 1966 and the time of composition.

As in most of Brautigan's long fiction (one need only recall In Watermelon Sugar or A Confederate General from Big Sur), The Abortion is the story of a man strongly influenced by the literature he has read and obviously absorbed. To a large degree, the difficulties experienced by Brautigan's central characters are caused by their belief that life is—or ought to be—like literature. From Jesse of A Confederate General from Big Sur (1965) to the down-at-the-heels detective of Dreaming of Babylon. Brautigan presents characters who try to fashion their lives according to literary creation. In some works, the literary model is specific, as in Dreaming of Babylon and Willard and His Bowling Trophies; in others, the model is more general or has yet to be identified. Literary forms, Brautigan suggests, provide a framework for thought. They create, too, expectations for life—but The Abortion is a measure of how cockeyed a life based on these expectations can become if a too literal transposition is attempted. How and what we think are strongly influenced by these structures, but such thought is limited, perhaps limiting. The greatest strength of The Abortion is that it is not just parody. The work is also a testimony to the enduring truth of literary forms, however incomplete and imperfect—their power to shape human behavior and render psychological reality in dream-like sketches. The Library Kid continues to work for America Forever, Etc., but little indicates that much has changed except his relationship to the world and Vida's condition. The narrator's heroism is unquestionably limited, but it is a heroism of the self, able to reach its goals while laughing at its own peculiar foibles.

Brautigan apparently feels that he has not yet exhausted the possibilities of infusing established literary forms with his own values. Nor is he done with the idea of steeping his compositions in the colors extracted from the work of others. The first piece in his recent The Tokyo-Montana Express (1980) examines and comments on the diary of Joseph Francl: "His diary is written in a mirror-like prose that is simultaneously innocent and sophisticated and reflects a sense of gentle humor and irony. He saw this land in his own way." Here, if anywhere, is Brautigan's manifesto. "There is no Dignity, Only the Windswept Plains of Ankona" in this recent collection is probably the shortest and looniest piece of science fiction that has yet been published. Those writing about future "Brautigans" would do well to examine the generic interplay that is certain to be there.

Kimball,1971

"Books & People"
George Kimball
The Phoenix, 25 May 1971, p. 14.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

The success of Michael McClure and Richard Brautigan must certainly give hope to "underground" writers everywhere. As late as five years ago, neither's work was known (or indeed available) to those outside the contemporary poetry/little magazine/small press scene. McClure, of course, had been anthologized as early as 1960 (in Don Allen's "The New American Poetry," which in 1971 still stands as the milestone in terms of introducing the contemporary scene to its "new" audience), and had published a number of excellent books of poetry, albeit to a relatively small audience. And Brautigan, a minor San Francisco poet, was best known in underground circles as the author of an intriguing book called "Trout Fishing in America," bits and pieces of which popped up in places like the City Lights Journal. "Trout Fishing," actually, had already made the rounds of major publishing houses, without success.

McClure is from Kansas, and during the middle fifties he was a central figure in a little-known "Wichita Renaisance." Although it made scarcely a ripple at the time, the Wichita scene included McClure, poets Charles Plymell and Glenn Todd, publisher Dave Haselwood, and artist-filmmakers Bruce Conner and Ike Parkey. The Wichita group emigrated to San Francisco en masse, and still forms the nucleus of the cultural scene there. McClure's poetry established him as a major figure on West Coast poetry circles, and he appears as a character in a number of Kerouac's later novels.

In 1965, McClure's play "The Beard" was performed by the Actor's Workshop in San Francisco, and closed on obscenity charges after four performances. It was subsequently staged by The Committee, and again in Berkeley, and busted every time. By the time the smoke had cleared—which took almost a year—and all the litigation been found in McClure's favor, "The Beard" was ready for New York, where, under the direction of Rip Torn, it opened to widespread critical acclaim. The playscript has sold tens of thousands of copies in paperback, and opened the doors for a number of McClure's subsequent works, including a collaboration with Freewheelin' Frank (Secretary of Hells Angels), the release of a disastrously bad novel, "The Mad Cub" (originally written during his teenage midwestern period), and a starring role in Norman Mailer's film "Beyond the Law."

Brautigan's rise to fame was less spectacular but perhaps more incredible. "Trout Fishing" was eventually issued in a small press edition, and by word of mouth alone its popularity spread throughout the nation so extensively that it was reissued by a publisher who had flatly rejected the manuscript some years before. Sales were so overwhelming that it was quickly followed, in rapid-fire succession, by the publication of "A Confederate General from Big Sur" and "In Watermelon Sugar," as well as three books of poetry, the collective sales of which make Brautigan a serious threat to Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Rod McKuen as the best-selling you-know-what in America.

Each has produced his best book (or best novel, in McClure's case; his "Dark Brown" and "Meat Science Essays" will stand for eternity as two of the best books of our generation) in these two novels. Brautigan's has already been widely praised by critics; I would venture the guess that McClure's will be less so, simply because few critics will even begin to undertake the cerebral gymnastics "The Adept" demands in its reading.

Like his poetry, McClure's fiction affects the six senses, and "The Adept" is above all a visual experience. Some will find his abrupt transitions, brainwave flashes, and mystical ruminations difficult to get used to. His protagonist, Nicholas, is a cocaine dealer, and the novel—superficially at least— is the account of a Day in the Life, including a trip to Arizona to score 50 pounds of coke from a corrupt border guard. To say that "The Adept" is about coke dealing, though, is like saying that "The Beard" is about cunnilingus or, for that matter, that "Trout Fishing" is about trout fishing. The book is about philosophy, about madness, about violence. If it is about anything, it is about the country we live in, and it is an utter masterpiece.

"The Abortion" is a more conventional book (or, as Kerouac used to say, a "'novel'-novel." It's actually a very long short story, the protagonist being the custodian of a public library in San Francisco. Not your usual sort of public library, you understand (not a "'library'-library"), but a repository for unpublished authors' unpublished works. They bring them there, and they are consigned to immortality (actually, when the shelves fill up, the books are taken away and stored in underground caves). The descriptions of the authors and their works is particularly touching to me. They remind me of some of the shit I used to have to reject daily when I was working for a New York literary agent; I suspect that Brautigan's poignant treatment has similarly personal connections. (Critics marveled at his rapid-fire production rate when he hit the big-time; actually Brautigan had already written the books over a dozen-year period of utter destitution and non-recognition. "The Abortion" is his first "new" book.)

But the librarian meets and falls in love with a voluptuous young girl who is remarkably well-adjusted save her trauma regarding her body—it is so superfine that the attention it attracts in public makes it impossible for her to function as a human being. The librarian, being the sort of fellow his is, is somehow unable to avoid constantly ogling her, and so forth. She ultimately gets pregnant, so they fly down to Tijuana and have it taken care of, which seems like the reasonable thing to do (at the time). And they live happily ever after.

Someone, without a doubt, is going to lay an "existential novel" label on one or both of these books. Bullshit. Zen, Yoga, Hindustani, maybe. But to say that either of these books is an "existential novel" is like, well, saying that "The Abortion" is about an abortion.

Kušnír,1999

"Brautigan's Parody in 'The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966'"
Jaroslav Kušnír
European British and American Studies at the Turn of the Millenium. Institute of English Philology Faculty of Arts University of Ostravia 185, 1999, pp. 49-55.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Richard Brautigan won his literary reputation with his earlier novels, A Confederate General from Big Sur (1964), Trout Fishing in America (1967) and In Watermelon Sugar (1968), which are considered to be his best novels by literary critics. Not only in these novels, but also in other works, especially these written in the 1970's, he intensively used parody as a vehicle for his ironic and critical vision of the world. The poetics of the popular genres he used in the 1970's (love stories, pornography, thriller, partly sci-fiction), served him as a suitable means for reconsidereing not only the funtion and understanding of these genres and their formerly "low status," but it also represents a suitable "framework" for challenging " . . .the traditional claims of literature and art to truth and human value" (Graff 1979, 32). The use of popular literature conventions and their subsequent subversion is not typical only for Brautigan, but also for postmodern fiction as such. According to Mepham (1991, 142) "Postmodernist literature . . . can . . . use low art forms (thriller, detective story, fantasy and so on), can imitate or make fun of past traditions (pastiche, parody) and can invent . . . more radically innovative and subversive forms." Parody is by many critics considered to be one of the most important literary modes of the 20th century (Hutcheon 1988, Bradbury 1980), and through its immanent "intertextual" or "metatextual" status (since it does not directly immitate reality on the mimetic principle, it does not directly refer to reality, but to the other of reality and its perception, or the distortion of its perception. According to Frosch "Parody is representation of representation; its subject is not nature but human fiction and speech, and in this most self-conscious and artifical of modes we see the convention-making faculty of the mind observing itself." (Frosch 1973, 382). Linda Hutcheon argues that " . . .postmodern parody does not disregard the context of and continuum with the past representations it cites, but uses irony to acknowledge the fact that we are inevitably separated from the past today—by time and by the subsequent history of those representations. This is continuum, but there is also ironic difference, difference induced by that very history . . ." (Hutcheon in Plett 1991, 226). Hutcheon further continues: "Postmodern parody is both deconstructively critical and constructively creative, paradoxically making us aware of both the limits and the powers of representation—in any medium" (Hutcheon 1991, 228).

Brautigan's novel The Abortion reminds one of a love story genre. Its main narrator is an unnamed librarian from a strange library where any unpublished books can be brought by any author, and where the opening hours are limitless. The love relationship revolves around the librarian and a beautiful but naive girl Vida Kramar, one of the authors of the books brought to the library. The title of the novel itself suggests a discrepancy between the generic status of this novel expressed in the sub-title (historical romance), and the word abortion. The idea of abortion undermines the traditional conventions of such genre. Such discrepancy manifests itself in several ways:

1./ abortion represents a cruel and violent interruption of a new ilfe in a female body and is in contradiction with the traditional conventions of traditional love stories or romances for which the motif of abortion is not typical

2./ it suggests the idea of physical, sexual love which is typical for the modern love stories rather than for the traditional sentimental love stories, or the "historical romances"

3./ the word "historical" from the subtitle of the novel does not refer to remote history, but to the contemporary modern world of advanced technology, cars, plans, computers and business.

The love relationship between a librarian working in a strange library and Vida Kramar, a beautiful girl, is in the centre of Brautigan's attention in this novel. Brautigan does not emphasize either the cult of sex, physical love, or ideal platonic love in this relationship, although both are depicted. His metaphorical language which manifests itself, for example, in the depiction of Vida's undressing and both lovers preparation for sexual act. Her undressing reminds one of a ritual of unveiling the beauty, tender erotic game, and her body becomes an object of "poetization."

"I had gone further than taking this strange awkward beautiful girl's book. I was now faced with taking her body which lay before me and had to have its clothes taken off, so we could join our bodies together like a bridge across the abyss.

"I need your help." I said.

She didn't say anything. She just continued staring at me. That brief blue lightning flashed again in her eyes, but it was relaxed at the edges.

"What can I do?" she said.

"Sit up, please," I said.

"All right."

She sat up awkwardly.

"Please put your arms up," I said.

"It's that simple, isn't it?" she said.

"How's this?" she said and then smiled. "I feel like a San Francisco bank teller."

"That's right," I said. "Just do what the note says," and I started her sweater gently off. It slid up her stomach and went over her breasts, getting briefly caught on one of them, so I had to reach down and help it over the breast, and then her neck and face disappeared in the sweater and came out again when the sweater went off her fingers . . .

I had finished with the top of her and now it was time to start on the bottom. There certainly are a lot of parts to girls.

I took off her boots and then I took off her socks. I liked the way my hands ran along her feet like water over a creek. Her toes were the cutest pebbles I have ever seen . . .

I looked into her face before I took her panties off. Her features were composed and though there still flashed bolts of brief blue lightning in her eyes, her eyes remained gentle at the edges and the edges were growing" (Brautigan 1995, 63-65)

Such depiction of the preparation for sexual act is psychologically unconvincing and does not correspond with the common readers expectations, but, at the same time, it changes the nature of the text. On the one hand, the librarian's perception of the naked female body is reminscent of the perception of the artistic picture through rather a poetic expression (simile—like water over a creek, metaphor—her toes were . . . pebbles), which evokes the feelings of beauty. A librarian supports his propensity to poetic, aesthetic understanding of eroticism and sex telling Vida: "Beauty is the hardest damn thing in the world to understand. Don't buy the rest of the world's juvenile sexual thirsts" (Brautigan 1995, 67).

On the other hand, the suppression of action and sexual excitement through Brautigan's "ritualization" of the process of preparation for sexual act is rather a naive erotic game on sexual act oscillating between a romantic idealization of beauty and a mild parody on romantic sentimentality. Such parody manifests itself in a certain "mechanization" of the process of undressing. Thus the "mechanization" reminds one of an instruction for physical excercise rather than a convincing depiction of sexual act. Both protagonists, Vida and a librarian, cannot reject the physical love, but it does not seem to bring them happiness. An unnamed librarian complains before the sexual act:

"Damn it.

I wasn't exactly what I had planned on doing when I started working in the library. I just wanted to take care of the books because the other librarian couldn't do it any more." (Brautigan 1995, 62). Vida does not like her body since it attracts the exeggerate attention of men, and eventually, the abortion evokes the negative feelings at both lovers. At the same time, Vida represents a Western ideal of beauty: "She was developed in the most extreme of Western man's desire in this century for women to look: large breasts, the tiny waist, the large hips, the long Playboy furniture legs.

She was so beautiful that the advertising people would have made her into a national park if they would have gotten their hands on her" (Brautigan 1995, 43).

Brautigan's comparison of her body to a national park evokes a parody on the imagery of the female body from the popular erotic magazines. Vida's rejection of physical love, the cult of body and popular male imagery associated with female body's eroticism manifests itself not only in her rejection of her own "body," but also in Brautigan's parodic depiction of male's reactions to her physical beauty. Vida complains: "I can't go anywhere without promoting whistles, grunts, howls, minor and major obscenities and every man I meet wants to go to bed instantly with me . . . Three years ago a man was killed in an automobile accident because of my body" (Brautigan 1995, 46).

Paradoxically, Vida's critical attitudes to males' sexual proposals is in contradiction with her behaviour—she becomes the initiator of a sexual act with an unknown person—a librarian, the result of which is not a new life and optimism, but death and destruction—abortion, a loss of a librarian's job, security and symbolically "freedom of imagination" represented by his library. Brautigan's depiction of Vida and love relationship between her and a librarian thus evokes the criticism of the consumer society both the protagonists are the products of. Graff argues that "Consumer society, in its destruction of continuity through the exploitation of fashion, ephemeral novelty, and planned obsolescence, effects a systematic derangement of the senses . . ." (Graff 1979, 92). Vida suggests abortion seemingly as the act of responsibility to a new child:

"I'm not ready to have a child yet," Vida said.

"And neither are you, working in a kooky place like this . . . I love children, but this isn't the time. If you can't give them the maximum of yourself, then it's best to wait. There are too many children in the world and not enough love. An abortion is the only answer" (Brautigan 1995, 71).

But this "responsibility" turns to be a Brautigan criticism of commercialsim of technologically advanced society causing depersonalization in human relationships and removal of natural feelings (motherhood)—Vida decides for abortion for economic reasons (she refuses the librarian's "kooky place"), and the act of abortion itself seems to be for the abortionist only a mechanical emotionless "commercial" act aimed to gain the commercial profit (flushing the aborted kids) despite the fact it represents the destructiion of life and death. Brautigan's criticism of the impersonality in human relationships and negative aspects of commercial culture are further supported by his use of imagery reminescent of sterility—white colour of the abortionist's room, airport, Woolworth supermarkets, sterility of his surgical instruments, and death (abortion itself, the room reminding of a morgue). On the other hand, Brautigan'd depiction of a strange library represents not only literal, but also a metaphorical alternative space to the commercial, technological and institutionalized world. This non-stop library accepting all books by any author undermines not only all the conventions of a traditional library, but it also evokes a parody of the "institutionalized" values through Brautigan's characteristics of the accepted books:

"MY TRIKE by Chuck. The author was five years old and had a face that looked as if it had been struck by a tornado of freckles. There was no title on the book and no words inside, just pictures. (Brautigan 1995, 25)

LOVE ALWAYS BEAUTIFUL by Charles Green. The author was about fifty years old and said he had been trying to find a publisher for this book since he was seventeen years old when he wrote the book.

"This book has set a world's record for rejections," he said. "It has been rejected 459 times and now I am an old man" (26).

THE CULINARY DOSTOEVSKI by James Fallon. The author said the book was a cookbook of recipies he had found in Dostoevski's novels (29).

THE STEREO AND GOD by the Reverend Lincoln Lincoln. The author said that God was keeping his eye on our stereophonic phonographs. I don't know what he meant by that but he slammed the book down very hard on the desk. (27)

We have accepted 114 books on the Model T Ford, fifty-eight books on the history of the banjo and nineteen books on buffalo-skinning since the beginning of this library" (35-36)

On the one hand, the nature of the accepted books reminds of a parody of the contemporary intellectual "discourse" on the popular culture (The Culinary Dostoevski, The Stereo and God), on the other one, in Brautigan's understanding despite their low and "absurd" value they symbolically represent the power of imagination and creativity. In this sense such a depiction of a library, in difference from the sterility and impersonality represented by the consumer society, represents a non-institutionallized values and attitudes to life marked by imagination, spiritual and mental freedom. According to Graff " . . . the autonomous creative imagination becomes the only hope for cultural salvation" (Graff 1979, 43).

In contrast to the poetics of the traditional love stories, Brautigan in his novel The Abortion does not focus on the depiction and development of the love relationship between these two lovers, emotions or family relationships, but through his untraditional depiction of the love relationship one of the novel's themes is criticism of the materialist and consumer society and a symbolic celebration of the human imagination and spiritual freedom. Brautigan does not depict either psychology of his characters or the motivation of their behaviour, they simply act, behave and are the passive victims of the culture and society they live in.

The year 1966 from the Brautigan's novel subtitle—An Historical Romance 1966—suggests a contradiction between the understanding of traditional historical romance and modern times evoked by this year. Reading the novel shows that it is set in the USA during the modern times, in the 1960's, so in difference from a traditional romance it does not depict the events from the remote past. N. Frye argues that in the romance " . . . the virtuous heroes and beautiful heroines represent the ideals and the villains the threats to their ascendency . . ." (Frye Anatomy of Criticism 1990, 187), that romance is characterized by "nostalgia" (186), "adventure" (187), "the quest" (187), "ritual death" (187), conflict between a protagonist and enemy (187), and simplicity (195). Brautigan's novel The Abortion bears some formal features of the romance, such as simple plot and composition, nostalgia and partial idealization of the "heroes," but these formal features are altered and undermined by Brautigan's use of parody. Seemingly idealized "heroes" Vida and a librarian soon turn into their parodic versions—instead of being active, a librarian becomes rather a passive solipsist accepting "the course of life," the winning of his "love"'s favor does not require much of his efforts and involvment, instead of the ritualization of death Brautigan ritualizes sexual act, the quest is missing and the adventure suppressed. The end of the novel suggests a possible happy ending—Vida has a job, a librarian collects contributions for a foundation, and they live together in a house, but their acceptance of the rules of the dominant consumer society (working for economic security) also suggests the symbolic end of spiritual freedom and imagination as the possible way out of the negative effects of such a society (alienation, impersonality). On the other hand, Brautigan's depiction of the atmosphere at the end of the novel anticipates a new hope, a new sensibility to be brought by the new counter-culture generation: "I like to set my table up around lunch time near the fountain, so I can see the students when they come pouring through Sather Gate like the petals of a thousand-colored flower. I love the joy of their intellectual perfume and the political rallies they hold at nooon on the steps of Sproul Hall.

"It's nice near the fountain with green trees all around and bricks and people that need me. There are even a lot of dogs that hang around the plaza. They are all shapes and colors. I think it's important that you find things like this at the University of California" (Brautigan 1995, 226).

Thus it can be said that Brautigan's parody of popular genre conventions in this novel does not evoke a ridiculous effect, but it suggest, on the one hand, an implicit criticism of the traditional literary genres (love story, romance), on the other one it suggests a new poetics of imagination symbolically referring to mental and spiritual freedom and expressing a new poetic sensibility which stands in contradiction with the negative effects of the advanced modern consumer society which Brautigan's novel criticizes.

Bradbury, M. "An Age of Parody: Style in Modern Arts." Encounter, vol. 55, no. 1, July 1980, pp. 36-53.

Brautigan, R. Revenge of the Lawn, The Abortion, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away. Houghton Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence, 1995.

Frye, N. Anatomy of Criticism. Penguin Books, 1990.

Frosch, T. R. "Parody and the Contemporary Imagination." Soundings, vol. 56, no. 4, Winter 1973, pp. 371-392.

Graff, G. Literature Against Itself: Literary Ideas In Modern Society. University of Chicago Press, 1979.

Hutcheon, L. A Poetics fo Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. Routledge, 1988.

Hutcheon, L. "The Politics of Postmodern Parody." Intertextuality. Heinrich F. Plett, ed. Walter de Gruyter, 1991, pp. 225-236.

Mepham, J. "Narratives of Postmodernism." Postmodernism and Contemporary Fiction. Edmund J. Smyth, ed. Batsford, 1991, pp. 138-155.

Lask,1971

"Move Over, Mr. Tolstoy"
Thomas Lask
The New York Times, 30 Mar. 1971, p. 33
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The Abortion, Richard Brautigan's new novel, is split almost evenly down the middle. Half of it is amiable fantasy, half realistic documentary so factual you can draw a map from its pages. It is possible to tie the two halves together symbolically or rather hang one half on the other. But that possibility depends more on the ingenuity of the commentator than on the merit of the work. After all, it's possible to correlate any two things in the universe. In spite of the fact that people come and go in this book and that part of it involves a journey by auto van, plane and bus from San Francisco to Tijuana and back, the work is essentially static. It never moves off center, never gets off the ground. One reason for this malaise is the author's catch-as-catch-can approach to the blank page. He grabs at a chapter and throws it to the mat. But his victories are easy ones.

The author's flip attitude is like watered whiskey. Only a whiff of the original comes through. The off-beat, the surreal, the neat observations of Trout Fishing in America have been changed into self-indulgent literary ticks. And the manner shows, I won't go so far as to say that Mr. Brautigan is contemptuous of those who put down hard coin of the realm for his books, but the substance of The Abortion is thin to the point of insensibility.

Library for All Writers
In The Abortion, the "I" who tells the story is in charge of a fabulous library, open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It's a great place; books are never borrowed, only deposited and they are books that have only just been written. Anybody with a finished manuscript can bring it into the library and leave it there. The literary values of these works are never questioned, the authors are never challenged, no book is ever rejected. All titles are entered into a ledger, and, in a marvelous twist, each author is allowed to shelve the book where he thinks it belongs.

Books written by destiny or by design, books that have haunted the author's imagination, the scribblings of illiterates, the confessions of the confused all receive the same courteous treatment. What a way to work off one's fancies, desires, ambitions, transcendental thoughts. Every man his own Plato. Tolstoy makes room for Mr. Smith. (In its early stages, The Abortion sounded very much like a short story by Israel Zangwill in which all those with memories too painful to keep or useless to retain could park them in a storehouse and either leave them there or exchange them for something more functional or pleasant.) But having established this literary house of fantasy, Brautigan is not quite sure what to do with it. So he introduces Vida (V-eye-da), an eye-catching female of superior endowments with whom the entire American Navy wants to be wrecked on a deserted island. Vida has a problem. Her appeal to men lies so heavily on her spirit that she wants to be changed into something else, something preferably long, thin and angular. Her problem is not so great though that she refuses to stay the night with the keeper of books, and before the reader knows it, or has a chance to back away, he is in the middle of a novel in which a guy takes a girl in out of the rain; they decide to share his bed; she becomes pregnant; they decide not to have the child. Sounds original, doesn't it? The last half of the book is a step-by-step account of how the two travel to Tijuana, how Vida has her abortion and how they return. Anyone interested in having such an operation in Tijuana or in the details of securing such surgery will find The Abortion tense with excitement. The rest of us (some 200 million maybe) will find it a paralyzing bore.

Moral Can Be Drawn
If one is determined enough, a moral can be drawn from this fiction. Maybe the library is the same way station for the unborn spirit as the abortion mill is for the unborn child. Maybe the author is condemning the waste in both instances. Maybe he is trying to draw attention to those inarticulate and dumb spirits who are unable to give form to their yearnings, who die unmarked and unnoticed in the man-swarm of humanity. Maybe—but I doubt it. For the book is so morally neutral, so entirely without nuance or reflection that it could easily be a chapter in a West Coast travel guide. No theorizing can prop up this jerrybuilt substitute for entertainment.

Brautigan has wandered a long way from Trout Fishing in America. There was an irreverent, unstructured, slightly wacky quality to those sketches that revealed an off-beat mind, a flexible, informal and tangy prose style and an original way of looking at the commonplace. The Kool-Aid Wino with his insatiable thirst for this perfumed, powdery, pop, the handsome trout, whose last moments are comforted by swigs of California port, the man inundated with thistle seedlings whenever he buys gas make a kooky attractive cast of characters.

And the life that wanders in and out of that book, defying the Establishment, normal economic laws and bourgeois morality, has a raffish and wry charm. But it's not a style that works with everything. In Watermelon Sugar was a feeble and amateurish exercise. It took 30 minutes to read and seemed interminable. There were things in it that could only be excused on the grounds that the author was being paid so much a word. The Abortion is not so great a failure, but it is a greater disappointment. Mr. Brautigan has let a good idea wither for lack of nourishment.

Major,1975

"Open Letters"
Clarence Major
The American Poetry Review, vol. 4, no. 1, Jan.-Feb. 1975, p. 29.
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Dear Jean Toomer:
Since you left a lot of interesting things have happened. I've come across some interesting novels, some of them worthy of the company of Cane. Last week I read a book called The Abortion by a fella named Brautigan. The way I see it, this book is making fun of the conventional novel, laughing out of one side of its mouth at the routines expected of novels. It seems to be a story about inner solitude and outward needs. We have this guy who's a sort of clit, snugly sunk there in the warm, generous comfort of the library, a vagina, (Way back in the hills another fella named Foster keeps the older books in a cave.) The library is also a metaphor for the narrator's entire inner life. When he meets Vida, a young woman, he manages, through the relation, to experience it as a bridge beetwen his own solitude and the outside world and the needs and affection of someone else. Going out from the monastery of himself he discovers that people need him. All along he's been here in this strange and beautiful library accepting the books (that are really still manuscripts) of authors who have no where else to take their books. The library's policy is to accept all, to give each new book a home. I came away with this really interesting sense of interplay between one's private sense of things and one's public sense of the same. Anyway, Vida, or Life, gets pregnant and the narrator is the potential father. This means he has to find an abortionist. Foster is called down from the caves. He is a strong male figure. He is also a devil-may care sort of spirit. He takes over, makes plans for their trip to Mexico, grudgingly keeps watch over the library. The language is very, very lean and bland and simple and obvious. But it seems all deliberate—perhaps part of the way by which the author expresses his cynical attitude toward the folly of making fiction. But he's also warm and compassionate. There is no bitterness here, no hurt pride. And that is remarkable when you think of all the years Brautigan was rejected and his characters, here, in The Abortion, who keep bringing in these books, called things like Growing Flowers by Candlelight, are greeted with such open armed, as their creations are registered in the Library Contents Ledger, at 3150 Sacramento Street. Meanwhile, in Tijuana, the abortion finished, they head back. We meet a San Diego cab driver, see inside a place called The Green Hotel, meet an assortment of dull people—all in dull, dull but strangely workable prose. The amazing thing about the whole experience—I mean reading the book—is, while you're reading it, you know you are following the interesting workings of an interesting mind at work. That is very likely the book's subject. But then, every fiction is about something other than its obvious subject. Ronald Sukenick recently reminded us of this. Something like that happens with The Fan Man, too, by William Kotzwinkle. Here, Jean, we're pulled into a world that is happening for the first time, but there is something familiar about every motion and thing in it. The narrator, a dude who calls himself Horse Badorties, is completely fillped out with love and collecting things like mad! Among his possessions are such things as a Chinese Army hat, a huge hot dog stand umbrella, a broken-down old school bus, and an endless series of electric fans that won't work; but Horse doesn't let it throw him. Nothing breaks his high spirits. He's determined to get every fifteen-year-old chick in the world together to sing love songs. All his movements are larger and brighter than anything we've ever seen happening in the world of New York—or anywhere—where they take place. And we're with him with his Plan. We want him to turn St. Nancy's Church on the Bowery into a burst of laughter. He lives steeped in junk. His speech is decorated with the word "man," in fact he can't say more than three or four words without inserting man somewhere between them. He hangs out in telephone booths, they serve as his office, while Horse—or Kotzwinkle—goes about the business of satirizing conventional fiction and making a statement on the dubious value of our materialistic society. In one cold-blooded chapter there is repeated, for ten pages, the word "dorky" because it's Dorky-Day. Kotzwinkle, like Brautigan, means to forge a new premise for the novel by ripping right through the form and false premise of the old. The new form is meant to destroy the old. He runs around with his walkie-talkie staying in touch with a black saxophone player. But unlike Brautigan, Kotzwinkle's laughter is directed more at characters and situations than at form and conventional technique. Then there's another book I read recently called Quake by Rudolph Wurlitzer. In one sense it's relly an old fashioned adventure story where you see the hero—narrator—going through many changes, though and Wurlitzer knows it. Brautigan knows it, Kotzwinkle knows it. In Quake we get, not a novel of distinct characters, but one made up of human images put together in a collage nightmare, nonentities, who at some level, I feel sure, represent the author's chilly need to invent workable puzzles. You can see this even better in Flats, where clearly the subject matter is the language and finally the book and how it is made. Flats is Wurlitzer's best yet.

In Nog he had not yet got beyond a concern for a struggle with making a new experience out of the rubbish of conventional subject matter. He did it well but in Flats the reder is not even asked to consider such dreariness. We're taken directly into the thing itself. Strangely, with Quake, Wurlitzer returns to the struggle with traditional concepts of subject matter though he does not handle the problem in a traditional way. Like Brautigan, in his novel The Hawkline Monster, Wurlitzer, attempts to ram a sharp set of horns directly through the flesh of a literary notion of capturing Experience as We Know It. While doing this, Brautigan, like Kotzwinkle, laughs a lot. Wurlitzer has no sense of humor that is allowed expression. Anyway, there are just a few of the books I've come across since you left. There are many others I plan to write to you about. One called Out by ronald Sukenick. Another called The Wig by Charles Wright. One called Life of a Riot by Judith Johnson Sherwin. So many good writers around today nobody can keep track of them. Anyway, I have to split now. More later.
Sincerely yours,
Clarence Major

Skow,1971

"Cookie Baking in America"
John Skow
Time, 5 Apr. 1971, pp. 94-95.
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Here is the author of Trout Fishing in America again, a trout in each pocket, picking watermelons off the overhanging branches. What to make of him? The best dodge may be to declare genius and withdraw, but this is not so easily accomplished.

"His stuff's too easy."
"It's nice, though."
"But it really is too easy."
"Yes, but very nice."

The skull-bound argument iterates, and there is no resolving it. For the half-beguiled, half-annoyed, unyoung straight reader, Richard Brautigan's gentle, shaggy little books have in them much of what is both very nice and too easy about the kid culture: its music, its mobility, its sex, the milder varieties of its pharmaceutical voyaging. Brautigan, at 36 an honorary kid, floats through his books on pure talent. If he does not seem to work very hard at his writing, well, they repealed the Protestant ethic after all and insouciance is one of his major attractions. His new book, for instance, is a warm, wobbly tale about a reclusive young man who works in San Francisco in a library for unpublishable books. It is Brautigan's happy idea that life's losers, an astonishing number of whom seem to be writers, can bring their mad, lame manuscripts to this library, where they will be welcomed, registered and placed lovingly on shelves. The books will not be read, but they will be cherished. The need for such a library is evident in the librarian hero's sampling of books received:

"The Stereo and God, by the Reverend Lincoln Lincoln. The author said that God was keeping his eye on our stereophonic phonograph. I don't know what he meant by that, but he slammed the book down very hard on the desk.

"Pancake Pretty, by Barbara Jones. The author was seven years old and wearing a pretty white dress. "This book is about a pancake," she said.

"Bacon Death, by Marsha Paterson. The author was a totally nondescript young woman except for a look of anguish on her face. She handed me this fantastically greasy book and fled."

There was not much plot in Brautigan's 1967 bestseller, Trout Fishing in America, or In Watermelon Sugar (1968), which were not so much novels as paper bags full of disassociated whimsy. By contrast, The Abortion has a real story. The heroine is Vida, who brings a manuscript to the library one night. Her book is about her gorgeous body, in which she feels uncomfortable. The hero makes her feel comfortable. They live together in the back of the library, and she bakes chocolate cookies, which the hero gives to old ladies who bring manuscripts at three in the morning. It is all very pleasant. Then Vida gets pregnant, pleasantly, and the two of them go to Tijuana and find a pleasant abortionist. When they return to San Francisco, someone has taken the hero's place in the library, but he does not mind and the book is over. It was very nice of Brautigan to write it and of Simon & Schuster to print it, and at the end, for some reason, the reader feels nice too.

Smith,1971

"Pink and Fading, in Watermelon Ink: The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966"
Mason Smith
The New York Times Book Review, 28 Mar. 1971, Sec. 7, pp. 4, 26.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

One way of receiving Richard Brautigan's new book is disarmingly suggested by the novel itself: there ought to be somebody in clothes of welcome on duty all the time to accept and register everything that anybody wants or has to write. Log it in, describe it briefly, let the author put it on the shelf of his choice, on no account catalog it, and give the relieved creator coffee and a cookie. Human rights for books!

The setting is a library devoted to the reception of manuscripts, an all-night depository for one-way communications, and the librarian who narrates the story has just accepted, among the day's 24 assorted acquisitions, another book by Richard Brautigan—looking "a little older, a little more tired" than when he brought in his first. "What's this one about?"the librarian asks. Brautigan's casual answer "Just another book."

That could be a very arch understatement, coming from the wise and funny man who wrote Trout Fishing in America. Of an order apart from most books, Trout Fishing in America was a totally original novel plotted in the changing shapes of a heart-breaking symbol for what is happening to America. "Trout Fishing in America" was a legless wino, a cheap hotel, a revolutionary slogan chalked on the backs of schoolchildren; it was the political disguise of the murderous "Mayor of the Twentieth Century"; It was a brooding spirit that remembered "people with three-cornered hats fishing in the dawn" and Lewis and Clark discovering the Great Falls of the Missouri. It was dead, extinct as the dinosaur (trout had become steel, streams had become stores), but it seemed to live, transformed again, in the life and prose and person of Brautigan himself. Every chapter had a secret hook to set, a steel meaning in a sparely-tied fly of anecdote and metaphor, a valuable and accurate surprise. Just another book like that is what you pray for every time you crack a new one.

The fact is we are still getting Brautigan writings from a time before Trout Fishing made the world his oyster. The new book has been around a while and owes more to In Watermelon Sugar, which itself was written a couple of years or more before Trout Fishing was published. The commonplace short dialogues of greeting, eating and bedding.—"Conversations and things that happen every day. (Work, baths, breakfast and dinner)"—;that gave In Watermelon Sugar so many relaxed, seemingly vacuous pages illustrated the novel's point about peaceful coexistence with mortality. They also suggested analogously that with regard to literary mortality the way to sanity was "watermelon ink"—which one imagines to be vaguely pink and fading while one reads. he new book is written almost entirely with the sugar-water sprezzatura of an artist who hands it in to a dead-end library and never expects to see it again.

The story is simple and straightforward. Two people help each other out of temporary blockages; an abortion, ironically, the agency of their delivery. This librarian is a nice confident human, but he has not faced the state of things outside the library for three years. The girl, Vida, comes into his library and his life with the problem that she hates her on voluptuous body: the leerings and pawings of the ubiquitous American mammaphile have made her wish she were a pipestem. Presumably thanks to the same gift which makes him the perfect book-greeter, the librarian immediately puts Vida at ease, even though he's as mad about her outsize breasts as anybody. They bed down very agreeably, the only resistance coming from hooks and buttons. "It was a difficult pile of clothes. Each garment was won in a strange war." The result is pregnancy, and that leads without soul-searching to a decision for Mexico and the mill of Dr. Garcia.

Here the book moves out of the whimsically imagined San Francisco library into the present California freeway and airport scene, and addresses, in an oddly frontal way, the Women's Lib themes of abortion and sex-objectification. It will be read in part as a rather uncomradely attack on Brautigan's fellow girl-watchers, and perhaps as some sort of statement about the nastiness and dishonesty of our social and legal pressures around the subject of abortion. But it's doubtful if the author of Trout Fishing—who did his damning there in the permanent and hard, artistic war—has his heart in such a lazy undertaking. There is something spooky and funny here, pale pink and fading.

A jolly friend named Foster is the foster-parent of the abortion. The trip to Tijuana is mostly a demeaning comedy of the confusion Vida's body wreaks among the males. Just before the little party leaves for the plane, South, an old lady (unborn?) comes to the library and demands to know what they have done with her (unborn?) mother. She has a book to deposit, but its pages are "blank like snow." What begins to ring true underneath the scorn piled on the American male, which is neither true, serious or interesting, is a steady, step-by-step notation of a real trip and a real abortion.

These parents of a prevented child are spooked numb by what they are doing. They go through with it by putting one foot before the other, and the librarian tells it all, straight. It will be the last thing you expected from Richard Brautigan, but you will know pretty well how it feels to go to Mexico on such an errand. After it is over, you will say with Vida, "You're looking at the future biggest fan The Pill ever had."

The Abortion is short, swift and formally neat, and though it contains some very offhand writing, this experiment along the limits of the watermelon thinness of Brautigan's ink is cheeky enough, and there are enough indelible stretches where the watermelon ink rinses out some India, to be just a little more than just another book.

Sonny,1971

"Books"
Sonny [sic]
Guerrilla [renamed Toronto Free Press, Toronto, Canada] June 1971, p. 19.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

If you enjoyed Trout Fishing in America, or any other of Richard Brautigan's books, you'll be as eager as I was for the reading of The Abortion: An Historical Romance. Abortion is now another old friend for me, to be cherished and read, again and again.

Half of the charm of Richard Brautigan's writing lies in the virgin-freshness, wonder and simplicity of his own mind, which always seems to see things as if for the first time. The other half lies in his ability to get it across to us "intimately along a small silver path to our hearing."

Richard Brautigan's prose-poetry does me fine fine fine. It puts me in touch with myself as surely as if I was dabbling my feet in a crystal stream in cool green forest, or making the first footsteps in a fluffy fall of new snow on a bright blue day.

Lyricism does not usually descend on abortions but then Brautigan is not your normal contemporary American writer. Nor does a public library generally abound in romantic possibilities but this too is a different sort of library. You see the main purpose of this library is not to lend books. It is to gather pleasently together the unwanted, the lyrical and haunted volumes of American writing, and it's important to make the person and the book feel wanted.

One such book is "Pancake Pretty" by Barbara Jones. The author was seven years old and was wearing a pretty white dress.

"The book is about a pancake," she said.

Another book is "Egg Layed Twice" by Beatrice Quinn Porter. The author said this book summed up all the wisdom she had found while living twenty-six years on a chicken ranch in San Jose.

"It may not be poetry," she said, "I never went to college but it sure as Hell is about chickens."

The librarian for this unusual library is our hero, who treasures books and even more the people who bring them. In fact he never leaves the library day or night in case he might miss an author.

Enter Vida with a book about her body. "Vida had been born inside the wrong body and was barely able to look at people, wanting to crawl off and hide from the thing that she was contained within." Her book "looked like a stark piece of ground burning with a frozen heat."

But our gentle librarian loves especially the people who hate themselves and thus it is that true love triumphs over the beautiful body which Vida finds so grotesque and triumphs also over the "excalating [sic] physical condition which is the result of their love but which is not "the shape of their kisses."

Dear Richard Brautigan,
I love you. Please write lots more books to make America beautiful.
Sonny

Waugh,1973

"Unwanted Books—in Fiction and Fact"
Auberon Waugh
Spectator, 27 Jan. 1973, pp. 108-109.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

The hero of Richard Brautigan's new novel is custodian of a curious library in San Francisco whose only purpose is to store all the unwanted volumes of American literature. These might be the ravings of lonely women living in hotels or the exercise book compositions of schoolchildren—anything that is written for the pleasure of writing which nobody could possibly want to read or publish. In fact, there is no arrangement for anyone to read them. The author is allowed to place his work lovingly on a shelf of his choice, the acquisition is recorded in the library register and after a time the books are taken and stored in hermetically sealed caves somewhere in northern California.

"You write down the title of the book and the name of the writer and a little something about the book into that big black ledger, Hugh?".

"That's right," I said. "And you have to be friendly, too. That's important. To make the person and the book feel wanted, because that's the main purpose of the library, and to gather pleasantly together the unwanted, the lyrical and haunted volumes of American writing."

One chapter is devoted to describing the books and their authors who call in a single evening. My Trike by Chuck. The author was five years old and had a face that looked as if it had been struck by a tornado of freckles. He Kissed All Night by Susan Margar. The author was a very plain middle-aged woman . . . "It's about a kiss," she said. Hombre by Canton Lee. The author was a Chinese gentleman about seventy. "It's a western," he said. "About a horse thief. Reading westerns is my hobby, so I decided to write one myself. Why not. I spent thirty years cooking in a restaurant in Phoenix". Growing Flowers by Candlelight in Hotel Rooms by Mrs. Charles Fine Adams etc. etc.

The library is visited by a Californian Zuleika Dobson of the most extraordinary beauty. Wherever she goes, cars crash and strong men commit suicide for love of her. The book she brings is about her body, which she loathes as the source of all her misfortunes. She stays, and under our hero's tuition—"it's a hard decision whether to start at the top or the bottom of a girl. With Vida, I just didn't know where to begin. It was really a problem"—learns to hate her body rather less.

The story of their idyll in the library is surely the best thing that Brautigan has ever written, deserving to be considered a classic of the California drop-out school. Brautigan has a real touch of poetry in his poor, freaked-out soul—"After a while Vida and I were so relaxed that we both could have been rented out as fields of daisies"—and on occasion he brings something of the discipline and polish of a Max Beerbohm to work on his rich and eccentric fantasy. If only he could have left the story at that, he would have created a work of art, a thing of beauty, a source of delight to his own age, marvel and wonderment to future generation. Alas, as we learned from Trout Fishing in America and A Confederate General from Big Sur, Brautigan never quite knows when he is being brilliantly funny and original and when he is being a bore. However short he makes his books they are always a little bit too long to disguise this fact. The main part of the story, which concerns a trip to Mexico to induce an abortion, is unoriginal, boring, and at times offensively twee. He describes the hero's childlike wonderment at aeroplanes, air hostesses etc, but it has all been done before, and one wept for the pure, brilliant perception of the library idyll. His new book is still, as always, a most enjoyable experience and streets ahead of anything in its genre, but if only he would submit to a sympathetic blue pencil he would be capable of something far better than that.

[Text deleted here . . .]

Yardley,1971

"Still Loving"
Jonathan Yardley
The New Republic, 20 Mar. 1971, pp. 24-25.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

A friend who owns a big college-town bookstore tells me that he looks with a puzzled wonder at the great stacks of Richard Brautigan in his paperback department. "Every day," he says, "I expect to come in from lunch and find that the Brautigan cult has vanished in my absence."

He's right, of course. Sooner or later—my own guess being sooner—Brautigan is going to go the way of many minor literary figures, and even some bigger ones, like Salinger, who appeal to the peculiar needs of late adolescence. But right now Brautigan is riding high. He is the Love Generation's answer to Charlie Schultz. Happiness is a warm hippie.

Brautigan is so warm it's impossible to say anything very nasty about him. The harshest critical guns must be muffled in bemused sweetness by someone of such overweaning ingenuousness that he can write, evidently in utter solemnity, a passage of such Nature Boy sentimentality as this: "There are high arched windows here in the library above the bookshelves and there are two green trees towering into the windows and they spread their branches like paste against the glass.
I love those trees.

Or who, turning his fine hand to poetry can produce Hallmark greetings like "Please," which I quote in its entirety: "Do you think of me
as often as I think
of you?

The Brautigan people regard their novelist-poet with the same affection they lavish on Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. When a Brautigan effort appears in the pages of Rolling Stone, the rock journal publishes it with typographical ruffles and flourishes, as though it were a heavenly beneficence. In the current issue of New American Review Brautigan is subjected to loving analysis by one John Clayton, who is enraptured by Brautigan's "stoned imagination" and his vision of Pepperland in which all Blue Meanies have been either routed or converted, but who sadly laments that Brautigan is content to lie back in the nostalgic world of Trout Fishing in America when he ought to be manning the ramparts with Clayton and other builders of a "radical movement."

It fascinates me that, in The Abortion as in virtually all of his publications, Brautigan's photograph is prominently featured on the front cover. He stands there, on the steps of what we are to take to be the library that is the book's setting, in a pose of careful casualness. His long (but not too long) hair and his elegantly droopy mustache, combined with his casual yet somehow ordered attire, contrive to create an image of gentleness and folksiness. Not even Mailer handles the cult of literary personality more deftly—but there the connection ends.

That the young should have taken so passionately to Brautigan is not surprising. He is the literary embodiment of Woodstock, his little novels and poems being right in the let's-get-back-to-nature and get-it-all-together groove. His exceedingly casual, off-hand style is wholly vogue, and I readily concede that there is a certain charm about it and him. His imagination is, as Clayton says, "stoned," and it is capable of coming up with funny pleasant surprises. Trout Fishing in America may not really be a novel, much less a good one, but it has an antic quality I like; the famous chapter titled "The Cleveland Wrecking Yard," in which Brautigan visits a junkyard which is selling a trout stream cut into sections and priced by the foot, is not bad at all. The Abortion is more conventional and less imaginative than Trout Fishing, but its little tale of an improbable romance in an improbable setting is diverting, and Brautiganites will find in it their usual joys. The loveable Brautigan himself is on hand as always, his own hero, talking about love and peace and the beauties of nature. The book is modestly funny, can be read in a matter of an hour or so, and will not hurt a soul.

Redekop,2009

"Monkey Droppings - The Abortion by Richard Brautigan"
Redekop, Corey
Shelf Monkey, 15 July 2009.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

What? A book about abortion? Outrageous! I'll never read your blog again!

I'm assuming that some readers who inadvertently come across this site may have that reaction. Now that they've left the building, let's continue.

The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966
by Richard Brautigan

We don't use the Dewey decimal classification or any index to keep track of our books. We record their entrance into the library in the Library Contents Ledger and then we give the book back to its author who is free to place it anywhere he wants in the library, on whatever shelf catches his fancy.

It doesn't make any difference where a book is placed because nobody every checks them out and nobody ever comes here to read them. This is not that kind of library. This is another kind of library.

First, let's get this out of the way: horrible cover art to this novel. Horrible. Reeks of madness and self-pubishing. Does not entice the reader, but repels with the force of literary kryptonite. That's the author, Brautigan, gracing the cover along with a singer named Victoria, if my research is up to par. Bad, bad cover.

That said, I pretty much love this book.

The Abortion - a novel concerning "the romatic possibilities of a public library in California," which summarizes exacly why I picked up the book in the first place - is a weird little exercise, a librarian's fantasy combined with a second-act account of, well, the title. It's a trifle of a novel, a wisp of literature that threatens to blow away completely at any moment, yet lingers like hints of cigar smoke in an old room. The public library in question, an unassuming few rooms in an unassuming building in San Francisco, is a gem of an idea that could never exist (and yet, thanks to the novel, apparently now does, although the exact placement of the library is hard to pin down). The library exists solely for the purpose of accepting any person's novel or book. A person can simply walk in off the street, drop off their magnum opus, and be on their way. The narrator (unnamed) is the librarian, a 31-year-man who has not left the building in three years. He accepts all offerings, and jots down personal entries on the subject and author in the ledger such as:

THE EGG LAYED TWICE by Beatrice Quinn Porter. The author said this collection of poetry summed up the wisdom she had found while living twenty-six years on a chicken ranch in San Jose.

"It may not be poetry," she said. "I never went to college, but it's sure as hell about chickens."

One day, the alluring Vida enters the library to drop off her book, shattering the librarian's world. Vida, born with a body "very sensual, inciting one to think of lust, while her face was Botticellian and set your mind to voyaging upon the ethereal," has written a treatise on the perils of being born as a physically perfect speciman, as she is a rather damaged human being as a result of the constant unwanted attention from both genders. Vida quickly envelopes the librarian's world, which eventually results in physical acts that, then, result in the topic contained within the title.

I cannot fully understand, or put into words, the effect The Abortion had on me, and I have the feeling that overanalyzing the work will only dilute its already-fragile nature. There is very little in the way of plot, and the work as a whole has the effervensence of nostalgia. It's part fantasy, part romance, and part jarring clash with reality. There is no way the narrator's job can exist, and I never once believed it could (although I desperately wanted to believe). The Abortion is a clumsy little beast, and hard to defend from any traditional narative standpoint. But it is one that engenders great affection. Brautigan shows his strength as a novelist as the plotline develops from unusual love story to realistic drama. Vida and the narrator come to the conclusion that neither of them are equipped at the moment to deal with the baby, and they arrange for an illegal abortion in Tijuana. There is no sensationism here, no heart-felt debate, no histrionics. There is no back-alley abortionist, no crude sensationalism. What happens is the result of two rational human beings making a choice, and then following through to the consequences. The procedure is clean, unemotional, yet weighted with unsaid significance. And then their lives continue. They go back to the library, something happens (no spoilers here), and their lives continue.

I was unaware of Brautigan and his output until coming across this novel on the shelves of my local public library. He was a counter-culture author 10 the 1960s, acclaimed but never a huge seller, and he suffered from a variety of mental issues, arguably leading to his suicide in 1984. But I will now be seeking out his other works. The Abortion isn't a perfect creation; it's lumpy and shaky, constantly threatening to collapse. But its humour and passion shine through the cracks.

Verdict: MONKEY LIKES A LOT